Technical Field
This invention relates generally to the field of multimedia objects and human interactive proof (HIP) technology. More specifically, this invention relates to creating and deploying dynamic multimedia objects that may or may not be embedded with HIP capability.
Description of the Related Art
Online advertising has emerged as an important element of any advertising campaign. However, the effectiveness of the existing advertisement (ad) formats such as online banner ads is far from optimal. Several banner ads on a webpage crave for attention and have led to a phenomenon called banner blindness. Banner blindness is a phenomenon in web usability where visitors on a website ignore banner-like information. Indeed, web usability tests are regularly proving that, knowingly or unknowingly, the users are ignoring ads or images.
The similar problem exists in the mobile, tablet or any small screen device capable of accessing information and ads. Human attention on ads is not effectively captured today.
The growth of internet usage across different interfaces and devices has led to widespread adoption across all demographics. The number of websites is ever increasing and more financial transactions happen on the internet. Websites are widely used to provide users with a convenient means to buy tickets, access personal account information, open new email accounts, add content to existing content such as comments on blogs, upload multimedia content on websites, or to access other services. Such systems are not only convenient to website owners as well as to their users, but also reduce overall costs.
Unfortunately, such systems can also provide a loophole through which hackers can obtain access to personal or other restricted data, disrupt services, poison existing content with irrelevant information declining the value of existing content, consume all the resources of the website for malicious activities, and distribute worms or spam. Such activity is commonly performed through the use of automated bots, scripts, and other malicious computer programs.
The above-described activity has led to the development of Human Interactive Proof (HIP) technology. HIPs are challenges that can be presented via software to a user to help insure that a human being, as opposed to an automated system, is interacting with the software. A HIP challenge must be simple enough so that users aren't discouraged from using a service. However, at the same time the HIP challenge must be difficult enough to make the cost of developing or processing a malicious bot or script to break such HIP uneconomical and challenging.
One form of an HIP which is widely used is a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA.) CAPTCHA technology is a particular challenge—response system that attempts to ensure the response is from a human, which helps to isolate the human traffic from the malicious bot or script traffic. An example of a CAPTCHA is shown in FIG. 3, left-hand side. In this example, a challenge 302 is presented on a typical sign in webpage 300. In this example, the user is required to type in a response answer in a response textbox 303. CAPTCHAS are fast becoming pervasive across the Internet because as websites move towards collaborative user-generated content and increased web resources, the need of distinguishing genuine users from bots and scripts and maintaining user privacy is important.